February 15, 2019
by Warren L.Nelson
A huge official history by the US Army of its long war in Iraq concludes that the only victor in that war has been the Islamic Republic of Iran—and says the United States was wrong not to attack targets inside Iran that were helping Iraqi militias to strike US troops.
The 1,300-page, two-volume study concludes: “At the time of this project’s completion in 2018, an emboldened and expansionist Iran appears to be the only victor. Iraq, the traditional regional counterbalance for Iran, is at best emasculated, and at worst has key elements of its government acting as proxies for Iranian interests. With Iraq no longer a threat, Iran’s destabilizing influence has quickly spread to Yemen, Bahrain, and Syria, as well as other locations.”
That conclusion was an extremely harsh indictment of the Bush Administration decision in 2003 to invade Iraq and topple the regime of Saddam Hussein.
The report said that one of the US military’s major failings during the years of occupation was its inability to cope with the Iraqi militias that enjoyed help and sanctuary from Iran. It said the United States should have looked at the option of attacking sites inside Iran militarily to de-fang the militias.
“The United States must develop a whole-of-government approach for neutralizing such sanctuaries, which have posed a problem for the United States since the end of World War II,” the report’s concluding chapter said. “From an early stage in the war, Syria and Iran played a highly destabilizing role in Iraq. Both sought to bog the US-led coalition down to gain advantage in the regional political struggle and deter the United States from seeking regime change in their countries. They also opposed the creation of a new US-allied Iraqi government.
“They gave sanctuary and strategic assistance to the Sunni and Shia insurgencies, respectively, and contributed materially to the killing and wounding of tens of thousands of Iraqis and hundreds, if not thousands, of coalition troops.
“US military and civilian leaders recognized this problem early in the war but never formulated an effective strategy for ending or even neutralizing it. US leaders refrained from direct measures against those regimes, and instead left the matter to [the] US theater command that could only operate against Syrian and Iranian operatives and proxies inside Iraq itself—with very rare exceptions.
“As a result, the Syrian and Iranian regimes became more and more emboldened. In particular, the Iranian regime produced sophisticated and lethal technology for their Iraqi proxies to use against US troops, and US forces had difficulty keeping up with the evolution of Iranian weapons such as explosively formed penetrators and improvised rocket-assisted munitions (IRAMs).
“These weapons killed and wounded scores of US troops, but the United States responded to them only at the tactical and operational levels, not the strategic [cross-border level]. By imposing artificial geographic boundaries on the conflict, the United States limited the war in a way that made it difficult to reach its desired end states….
“Although the United States should always be wary of expanding a conflict to other nations, US leaders should consider the option of escalation—including with military power—when neighboring states become de facto combatants. In Iraq, the US inability to find an effective response to Syrian and Iranian proxies made accomplishing our political and military objectives almost impossible,” the report concludes.
The study was commissioned by former Army Chief of Staff Gen. Ray Odierno in 2013 and continued under current chief Gen. Mark Milley. It had been under wraps since 2016, when it was completed, until finally released without advance notice January 17. Some said it was held up due to concerns over airing “dirty laundry” about decisions made by some leaders during the conflict.
Col. Joe Rayburn and Col. Frank Sobchak, both retired, wrote the study. They noted the damage to the political-military relationship that the war caused.
“The Iraq War has the potential to be one of the most consequential conflicts in American history. It shattered a long-standing political tradition against preemptive wars,” the authors wrote. “In the conflict’s immediate aftermath, the pendulum of American politics swung to the opposite pole with deep skepticism about foreign interventions.”
One issue raised repeatedly in the study is the lack of troops available for other operations, such as the war in Afghanistan, and lack of an operational reserve in Iraq for responses to major events.
The study’s authors say a lack of understanding of the inner workings of Iraqi politics and social struggles meant some military actions actually exacerbated problems.
Half of all the brigades in Iraq at the time of the 2005 election were National Guard units, not regular Army forces, less experienced soldiers thrust into a critical time of the war without enough resources.
The authors also said the US Army leaned far too much on “inputs” rather than “outputs”—for example, money spent, Iraqis trained or insurgents killed or captured — rather than whether there was more cooperation with locals or a reduced number of attacks by militias.
“Army leaders have become too enamored with the ‘fetish-ization’ of statistics and metrics, when they only provide a snapshot in time of a portion of the situation,” the authors wrote.
Highlights include the following:
• The need for more troops: At no point during the Iraq war did commanders have enough troops to simultaneously defeat the Sunni insurgency and Iranian-backed Shiite militias.
• The failure to deter Iran and Syria: Iran and Syria gave sanctuary and support to Shiite and Sunni militants, respectively, and the US never developed an effective strategy to stop this.
• Coalition warfare wasn’t successful: The deployment of allied troops had political value but was “largely unsuccessful” because the allies didn’t send enough troops and limited the scope of their operations.
• The National Guard needs more training: While many National Guard units performed well, some brigades had so much difficulty dealing with insurgents that US commanders stopped assigning them their own battlespace to control. The study found that Guard units need more funding and training.
• The failure to develop self-reliant Iraqi forces: The US-led effort to train and equip Iraqi forces was under-resourced for most of the war. A premature decision to transfer sovereignty to the Iraqis made it harder to blunt political pressure by Iraqi officials on Iraqi commanders, which led to an ineffective Iraqi Army that fell apart in the face of the 2014 attacks by the Islamic State.
• An ineffective detainee policy: The US decided at the outset not to treat captured insurgents or militia fighters as prisoners of war and then never developed an effective way to handle detainees. Many Sunni insurgents were returned to the battlefield.
• Democracy doesn’t necessarily bring stability: US commanders believed the 2005 Iraqi elections would have a “calming effect,” but those elections instead exacerbated ethnic and sectarian tensions.